The home for founders. A campus, a community, and a first check for builders solving hard problems at the edge of what's possible. Located where Fisherman's Wharf meets the Golden Gate — at Fort Mason, San Francisco.
Furqan Rydhan started coding at 15. By 17, he was running a multi-million dollar ecommerce company. Decades of building software and hardware companies — including Bebo, AppLovin, and thirdweb — led him to a single realisation: the most important thing a founder can have isn't just capital. It's a place. A community. People around them who genuinely believe in what they're building before anyone else does.
Founders, Inc. was born from that idea in 2020. Not a traditional VC. Not a time-boxed accelerator. Something that didn't have a clean category yet — part community, part studio, part fund. Three years in, it had grown into a 42,000 sq ft campus at Fort Mason, where the Bay sits outside the window and the builders sit inside getting to work.
The only similarity between Founders, Inc. and a VC is that both write checks. But a VC won't give you a desk, make you lunch, or cheer at your Friday Ship-It demo.
Between Fisherman's Wharf and the Golden Gate. On the water. On purpose.
Fort Mason is a National Historic Landmark — a place that's housed artists, cultural organizations, and community builders for decades. Founders, Inc. sits inside this setting as one of the most unusual things in Silicon Valley: a tech campus that genuinely feels like a place worth being in. 80 desks. Views of the Bay. Machines to build the future on.
Furqan started working at a dot-com at 15. By 17, he was running a multi-million dollar ecommerce operation. Then AppLovin (CTO), then Bebo (Co-founder & CTO), then thirdweb (Co-founder — backed by Coinbase Ventures, Shopify, and 55,000+ developers). In between all of that, he built Founders, Inc. — not as a side project, but as the main event. A place he wished had existed when he was starting out. An entrepreneur, investor, and technologist whose résumé reads less like a career path and more like a catalogue of categories that didn't exist before he showed up.
AppLovin CTO Bebo Co-founder thirdweb Co-founder Serial Builder since 15 SF-basedOver three years, Founders Inc has backed 100+ companies across AI, AR/VR, Web3, Hardware, and DevTools. Some of the most notable names in their portfolio:
Portfolio sectors at a glance ↓
*Approximate distribution based on publicly listed portfolio. Not exhaustive.
Founders Inc's latest program isn't for the curious. It's for the obsessed. Canopy is a five-week intensive — in San Francisco on campus, or online — where founders build alongside the most driven builders in the world. Applications to the April 2026 cohort closed April 4. Watch the next one.
5 weeks in SF or online. Build alongside the most obsessed builders in the world. Get mentorship, community, resources — and if you're building something real, a shot at a first check.
APPLY TO CANOPY →Founders Inc and the founders building out of Fort Mason have been featured in two of the most widely-read publications in the world.
If you're building something at the edge of what's technically possible — in AI, hardware, AR/VR, Web3, robotics, or anything that doesn't have a clean category yet — Founders Inc might be the first people who actually believe in it as much as you do.
They'll be your first check ($100K–$250K), your first community (80 desks, daily lunch, office hours), and your first home base — with no fixed end date. The value compounds with time, not against a demo-day countdown.
For the right builder, this is the place that removes the excuse of "I didn't have the space or the support." The space is there. The support is there. The only variable is you.
Typically 4–7% equity. "Minimal," by design. They want founders to keep control of what they build. The relationship is the point, not the ownership percentage.